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Here’s why it’s unlikely a presidential winner will be declared on election night

Here’s why it’s unlikely a presidential winner will be declared on election night

(AP) — Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared soon after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.

Trump set the pattern in 2020 when he declared victory in the early hours of Election Day. That prompted his allies to demand officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the last four years falsely claiming fraud cost him the election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the United States.

But one of the many reasons we’re unlikely to quickly know the winner on Election Night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay vote counting. Second, most signs point to this being a very close election, and it will take longer to determine who won a close election than who lost it.

At the end of the day, election experts say, the priority in counting votes is to ensure accurate and reliable results, not to end tensions once the polls close.

“There’s no shame in it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The delay is necessary to protect the integrity of the process.”

Trump’s demand also appears to ignore the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.

David Becker, an election expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” a book exposing Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, said it was unrealistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”

The presidential campaign is down to a final push in several states ahead of Election Day. (Source: CNN)

Trump wants the race to be decided Tuesday night

During a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Trump demanded that a decision on the race be made soon after some polling places began to close.

“They should be resolved by 9, 10, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” Trump said. “A bunch of dishonest people. These are dishonest people.”

It is unclear who he was targeting when he spoke of “crooked people.”

The timing is one example of why Trump’s demands do not match the reality of US elections. By 11:00 pm ET, polls will close in two Western swing states, Arizona and Nevada.

Trump has left conservatives complaining that U.S. elections are not being counted as quickly as in France or Argentina, where results of recent races were announced hours after polls closed. But this is because these countries only tally results for one election at a time. The US decentralized system does not allow the federal government to control elections.

Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each with its own elections for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballots that must be cast simultaneously. This is why the US takes longer to count votes.

FILE - Allegheny County Deputy Election Supervisor Chet Harhut carries a container of...
FILE – Allegheny County Deputy Election Director Chet Harhut carries a container of mail-in ballots from a secure area at an election warehouse in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)(AP)

It may take time for the winner to be announced

The Associated Press calls a race when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate will be able to fill the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, the winner can be named quickly. But if the difference is narrow, then every last vote can matter. It takes time before every vote is counted even in the country’s most efficient jurisdictions.

In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won a U.S. Senate race in Florida, where state conservatives regularly praise him for his quick vote count. But the AP did not call Scott’s victory until after the recount was completed on Nov. 20 because Scott’s lead was so narrow.

It also takes time to count each of the millions of votes as election officials have to process disputed or “provisional” ballots and check whether they were cast legally. Ballots from military personnel or other U.S. citizens stationed overseas may arrive at the last minute. Mail-in ballots are usually delivered early, but require a lengthy process to ensure they are not fraudulently cast. If that process does not begin before Election Day, he may certify the vote count.

Some states, such as Arizona, also provide voters whose mail ballots were rejected due to signature mismatches with proof that they actually voted. This means final numbers simply may not be available on Tuesday evening.

Election rules are to blame in some states

This slowness is partly due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials have been pleading with Republican lawmakers for years to change a law that prevents them from processing their mail ballots until Election Day. This means mail-in ballots are counted late, and results often don’t begin to be reported until after Election Day.

Democrats have traditionally dominated mail-in voting, making it appear as if Republicans were in the lead until the early morning hours of the next day when Democratic mail-in votes are finally added to the tally. Experts even have names for it from past elections—“red mirage” or “blue shift.” Trump took advantage of this dynamic in 2020 when he led his supporters to demand an abrupt halt to the counting of votes—the ballots that remained uncounted were mostly mail-in and destined for Joe Biden. It’s unclear how that will happen this year as Republicans shifted and voted in large numbers during early voting.

Michigan previously had similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022, they lifted the ban on early processing of mail-in ballots. Democratic state Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said she hopes to have most of the results by Wednesday.

“At the end of the day, election officials are the people who can provide accurate results. Americans should focus on what they are saying, not what any particular candidate or people on the campaign trail are saying,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday said he believes he “should never have left” the White House after he lost the 2020 election. (POOL)

Trump’s allies urge him to declare victory as soon as possible

Some of Trump’s allies say he should be even more aggressive in declaring victory this time.

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who predicted in 2020 that the then-president would declare victory before the election was called, advocated a similar strategy during a recent news conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for contempt. authorities. The congressional verdict stems from an investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 loss.

“President Trump came over at 2:30 in the morning and talked,” Bannon said. “He should have done it at the 11th hour in 2020.”

Other Trump supporters took a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing podcast American Truth Project that violence could break out in states that are still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “just aren’t going to put up with it.” . »

In an attempt to project a sense of certainty about Trump’s victory, the former president and his supporters touted early voting data and positive polls, claiming the election was all but over. Republicans have returned to early voting after largely staying away from Trump’s guidance in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outperforming Democrats in early voting.

But that doesn’t mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data doesn’t tell you who will win the election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign was clearly aimed at Republicans disillusioned with Trump. Each of these states that voted more Republicans also has huge numbers of early voters who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris had gotten even slightly more votes than Trump, it would have erased the Republicans’ slight advantage.

There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: wait until enough votes are counted, whenever that may be.